English CFS Activists are Helping to Show that CFS is Related to AIDS

In England, patients with CFS have been under attack
by an aggressive group of psychiatrists who are
determined to prove that CFS is a psychiatric
disorder. It has been a very nasty battle and has
given a great deal of impetus to scientific attempts
to show that CFS is a real physiological illness. As
with most CFS research that has been done in America,
the more serious the research in England gets, the
more it seems to suggest that CFS is part of the AIDS
epidemic. The newest research showing that CFS is a
disease of oxidative stress is no exception.

For a couple of decades a few scientists in Australia
known as "The Perth Group" have insisted that AIDS is
a disease of oxidative stress. They have argued that
HIV has never been properly isolated and has not been
shown to be the cause of AIDS. The Perth Group has
tried to show that gay lifestyle factors have been the
source of the oxidative stress.

A new paper published in Free Radical Biology &
Medicine (2005:39:584-589) By Gwen Kennedy, Vance A
Specne, et al. concludes that "Oxidative
stress levels are raised in chronic fatigue syndrome
and are associated with clinical symptoms." Give that
nobody has yet accused CFS sufferers of secretly
conducting gay lifestyles, the Perth Group may want to
reconsider their theories about the source of
oxidative stress in AIDS. No one has yet proposed a
theory that two kinds of oxidative stress--gay and
straight--are causing a very similar epidemic in both
gay and straight people at the same time.

Dr. Neil Abbot (Director of Operations of the charity
MERGE that funded the research) noted on the MERGE
website (www.meresearch.org.uk), "Circulating in the
bloodstream are highly reactive molecules, known as
free radicals, which can cause damage to the cells of
the body, a process called oxidative stress. In
healthy people, increases in free radicals are
neutralised by antioxidant defences, and it is only
when these defences are overwhelmed that cell injury
results. The source of excessive free radical
generation in ME/CFS patients may be associated
with a variety of altered biological processes".

Dr. Abbot also said that the research "suggested that
many patients currently diagnosed with ME/CFS could
have an inflammatory condition and be in a
'pro-oxidant state'".